It was a busy week, although this could become a normal week in time. Claudia started Sparks this week. She had a good time. While I was waiting to pick her up, a couple of Gillian's Guide Leaders had come in and there were quite amused that number 3 was now in Guiding.

Late last week Carla wasn't feeling well, she barely moved, she meowed like she was aching and I figured it was just a matter of time. Over the weekend she bounced back and she is back to her usual self. This picture is after she recovered.

Dollarama has some pretty cools things, we went last weekend and picked up a couple of Muppet puzzles.

The little pumpkin thing in the bottom right is a Rockets candy dispenser, just like a Pez dispenser. Found it at Dollarama.

I was down in Nova Scotia on Wednesday for work. You can follow me on the road with my work blog.

This week will be the first of many between now and June that the girls will have Guides, Brownies and Sparks on different nights. Three nights a week plus swimming on Sunday, plus me being away for work, will keep Susan running.

The girls started swimming yesterday, it will be a little chaotic for the beginning as they switch from the Red Cross Aquaquest program to the Lifesaving Society Swimmer program. Essentially they have combined 2 levels of Aquaquest into 1 level of Swimmer, resulting initially in a wider difference of skill level in a group, making it harder for the instructor to teach to all levels. Claudia seemed to to do well her first lesson, she is the smallest one in her class, and can barely touch the bottom when they moved to deeper water. We'll see how she does!

The girls school raised $7632 for the Terry Fox National School Run Day. Thanks for the sponsors.

I fell behind in the scanning and photographing the schoolwork department last year. So this year I am starting earlier. We can't keep it all, but we can take a picture. Here is Claudia with one of her early works.

Here is another picture of the girls holding their sea creatures. The photo from yesterday was kind of blurry so I had them pose again. The beauty of digital photography.

We think these things have reached their maximum size. We have taken them out of the water and are waiting for them to shrink.

They have outgrown their containers and needed to be moved to a new container.

The sea creatures continue to grow. Here they are after 24 hours.

A close-up.

Discovered this morning that the blog didn't work in Microsoft Internet Explorer. I tracked it down to a javascript I had on September 10th's entry. It was a Google Maps thing where you could insert a defined area into your website. It worked with Mozilla Firefox.

The girls received these growing sea creatures from Eden when we were in Victoria. We are finally getting around to putting them in water to watch them grow. They are suppose to expand over 600% of their original size. They went in at noon today.

A close-up view of the crab, blowfish and turtle.

It was 17 years ago around this time of the month that Carla was born. He was born the same year as Bradley. I dug out some photos from when he was a kitten. These are when Carla was approximately 6 weeks.

I went to Ajax to pick up a kitten from my brother-in-law's sister. I was told it was a female, hence the name "Carla", named after Carla Tortelli from "Cheers". It wasn't until later that she was a he, but by then the name Carla had stuck.

According to various sources on the web, the general consensus is that a cats first year is equivalent to 15 human years. The second year is equal to 24 and thereafter each year of a cat's life is equal to 4 human years. For example, a 3 year old cat would be the equivalent to a person 28 years old. Based on this Carla would be 84 years old if she were human. From this picture, I'd say he looks pretty good for an 84 year old.

I spent two days this week in Skid Control School, it was a 12 hour course. There was 4 hours in class and then 8 hours on the road and on the skid pad. It is probably the only place you can do 360° spins for fun at this age. It was a good course and will come in handy in some of the conditions I find myself driving through during the course of work.

Tomorrow (friday) is the Terry Fox National School Run Day across Canada. All the girls will run or walk a set number of laps depending on their grade. Here is a picture of Angela practising earlier in the month. She was so fast I could barely keep up with the camera.

After week 1 of a new school year, we are starting to get back into the swing of things. The girls are enjoying being back at school and seeing their friends. Gillian has started Guides already and Angela and Claudia will start Brownies and Sparks soon. It will keep us busy 3 nights of the week.

I have been working on setting up a RSS feed for the blog. RSS is short for Real Simple Syndication, basically it makes it possible for you to use a single tool to easily read news and posts from weblogs and news sites across the web. The news comes to you without using email. By subscribing to the RSS feed for our weblog, it would let you know everytime a new post is added. If you are interested in setting this up, let me know and I can help you set it up.

The girls all had a good first day of school. Gillian already had math homework and Angela said she asked for some homework. I dug into the vault to find our "First Day of School" pictures from the pre-digital camera era. Hard to believe this was our 7th time doing this.

2005 - Gillian Grade 5, Angela Grade 2, Claudia SK

2004 - Gillian Grade 4, Angela Grade 1, Claudia JK

2003 - Gillian Grade 3, Angela SK

2002 - Gillian Grade 2, Angela JK

2001 - Gillian Grade 1

2000 - Gillian SK

1999 - Gillian JK (and her friend Sarah)

Had a glimpse of the air show from the backyard. Saw the Snowbirds yesterday and today flying over the house. Earlier today we saw a big US military aircraft, I think it was a B-52.

The girls enjoying the last weekend of summer.

Yesterday we walked over to the school to check the bus schedule and discovered that there was a fire at the school. It was by the library and when we looked in the library it was empty and they were doing some repairs. It turned out the fire was actually outside the building and not inside. But there was still smoke damage to the books and computers.

The girls are excited about going back to school.

We'll see how long this lasts. After a month of daily updates during our trip, I am going to try and carry on with a blog about life around our house. It won't be updated as often and the pictures won't be nearly as spectacular, but it will force me to pull the camera out more often. Before our trip I wasn't taking very many pictures of the girls at home.

Here is a satellite photo of our house. Can you spot it?